Moscow – The dangerous strain of bird flu known as H5N1 has killed nearly half a million domestic fowl in southern Russia in the past month despite efforts to control the outbreak by culling poultry, the Emergency Situations Ministry said Wednesday.
About 495,000 birds in southern Russian regions near the Caspian and Black seas have died since Feb. 3 from the virulent strain of bird flu, which can also infect humans, ministry spokesman Viktor Beltsov said. Another 220,000 birds were killed in an attempt to stem the outbreak, he said.
This is the third large outbreak of the H5N1 strain of bird flu in Russia, but the previous episodes involved fewer deaths of sick birds.
Last summer, about 17,000 birds died from the flu strain while more than 600,000 others were killed in an effort to prevent the disease’s spread, according to the ministry.
During a second outbreak from October to January, about 1,500 birds died of the disease and 6,500 were culled.
Health officials fear that the disease might mutate into a form that could be easily transmitted from person to person, possibly triggering a worldwide flu pandemic. The larger the number of human cases caught from contact with birds, the greater the chances for such a mutation to occur, experts say.
The disease is not spread to humans through birds that have been properly cooked.
